Chapter 12 #2
We would have passed through that place without incident, if only they’d contented themselves with insults and thrown swedes.
But then that fucking fool grabbed me by the hair.
I want you to understand that I intended to kill him. That I would have, or already had. In that moment I could feel the memory of his death in my nerves: the gristling crack of his vertebrae separating; the wet, hollow sound of his head—no, it was his hand, only his hand—striking the mud—
I blinked. My fist was around my hilt, but the sword was not fully drawn. The villager was not dead, or even injured.
You were standing between us, looking up at me through the fine glass windows of your spectacles. Your fingers were tight around my wrist, as if you thought you could stop me. As if it had never crossed your mind that I might cut you down to reach him.
I was tempted, for a long red moment, to teach you better.
Then I felt something trickle warmly down my wrist, slipping between my knuckles, and I realized you were holding me hard enough that your wound had opened afresh.
I sheathed the sword with a quick metal slither and let go the hilt. I have never liked to see you bleed.
I looked up at the villager, now swaying with a strange, sick expression on his face, as if he knew how close his own death had flown by him and was not wholly relieved that it had missed. Half his hair had been burned away, replaced by slick pink scars.
“Run,” I told him. He ran, and the others—his daughters or sisters, grim-faced Hyll women who could not afford the indulgence of dying—ran after him.
At the edge of the village, I knelt and linked my fingers together. After a pause, you stepped carefully in my cupped hands and let me lift you into the saddle. I walked; you surely would not want to touch me, now that you knew what I was.
We traveled miles before we made camp that night, and for once you had nothing to say. The silence was less welcome than I thought it would be, after so many days of your jackdaw chattering.
Eventually you said, “Bastard.”
I shrugged. I had been called worse that day.
Then you said, “He shouldn’t have touched you.
None of them should have dared,” and I realized that it was not me you were angry with.
I watched a faint flush spread across the bridge of your nose as you paced and ranted.
You gestured violently with your injured hand; a fleck of blood hissed in the fire.
“Come here,” I said, and you did.
The wound was deep, still oozing, the bandages crusted yellow and pink. I ought to have tended to it sooner, but I had been reluctant to hold your hands in mine. It was sinful enough, the way I looked at them.
I spoke while I worked, to distract myself. I tried to make you understand why they hated and feared me, and why they were wise to do so. You argued with me until I snapped—no one else provokes me so—“They should fear me, boy. And so should you.”
I tied the bandage and drew away, but you caught my hand in yours. “Well,” you said, your voice high and hoarse, “I don’t.”
And this time when you looked at me, I knew you did not see the Una Everlasting you wrote about in your book, pure and true and beautiful. You saw me as I was: old and scarred and brutal, a monster that would turn on even a harmless villager.
You had seen the truth of me and yet you were still here, holding my hand, and I couldn’t seem to pull away.
I watched, feeling both drunk and dead sober, as you turned my hand gently in yours. You studied it for a moment, running your thumb over the hard planes of callus, then bent and touched your lips to my open palm.
A shudder wracked me from skull to spine, and I knew suddenly how it would be with you.
Most of my lovers—camp followers and soldiers, crofters’ daughters and the idle sons of lords—had wanted only to take or be taken; they came to me warily or arrogantly, shy or swaggering, as to a caged wolf.
But you—oh, you would come to me on your knees, as to a king, and you would give and give.
I was leaning down to you, ready to let you, when you looked up from my palm. You met my eyes—and flinched.
So you were afraid, after all. Good.
I pulled my hand sharply from yours and strode back to my side of the fire. I felt your eyes follow me, huge and dark. “Una, I—”
“Don’t.” The word was harshly hewn. “Don’t.” For once, you listened; for once, I wished you hadn’t.
I fell asleep with my fist clenched around my own palm, as if your kiss were a dove or a lark, which would fly from me unless I held it fast.
Six days later, we climbed Cloven Hill.
You were nervy and overtalkative the whole way up.
You dressed me well for battle—had you squired in your youth?
had armor changed so little, in nine hundred years?
—but your hands shook badly. I should have told you how many dragons I had slain, but I didn’t; it was such a novelty, to be fussed over.
It had been one of Yvanne’s very first decrees as queen, that Dominion should be rid of dragons. They were the devil’s own creatures, she said, for they lived on and on, undying, and only the Savior was deathless.
There was some opposition at first, especially in the north, where dragons were still carved into lintels and coffin lids for luck.
And there were the stories told by the Roving Folk: that a drop of dragon’s blood could heal any wound or cure any sickness; that a dragon’s heart might be planted, like a seed, and the tree that grew from it would live forever.
But these, the queen said, were pagan superstitions, which would not be tolerated in Dominion. If a person was pious and loyal, he would report all dragon sightings to the crown, and after the dragon was slain, he would burn the carcass three times over, and scatter the ashes.
I had slain nearly a score myself, and hated it every time.
I told you Hen’s name before I left—he didn’t usually kill people who called him by name—and you said, woundedly, “You’re leaving me here?”
“Yes,” I said.
Dragons were not especially vicious; in truth, I was not even sure they breathed fire. They reminded me more than anything of the whales I’d once seen in the coves of the Slant Sea: vast and placid, wholly alien.
But there was always the chance this dragon had learned to be vicious, over the years, and the idea of you standing nearby, unarmored—no.
Yet you argued with me! You told me I couldn’t slay a dragon alone; I assured you that I could. You begged to come with me, although you looked nearly sick with fright as you said it.
I had never minded a coward at my side, in battle. A coward is reliable, in his way—every choice he makes is the one that serves him best. I didn’t know what to do with whatever you were.
In the end I said, roughly, “Stay,” and you did, though I felt your eyes follow me until I disappeared into the low, shifting clouds.
It was not hard to track, even in the mist. There were scuff marks on the stones where a long, scaled belly had scraped past, and furrows in the earth where something huge had launched itself into the sky.
The marks led me to a cleft in the mountaintop too shallow to be called a cave, too huge to be the den of a bear or lynx. The air around the entrance smelt of snake piss.
I did not slow down or even soften my steps; dragons were torpid in winter, like adders. I simply ducked beneath the granite ledge and there it was, coiled over itself like an enormous serpent. The last dragon in all of Dominion.
It was not the largest I’d seen—there had been one on the Isle of the Penitent with wings like a pair of ship’s sails—but I thought it might be the oldest. Its claws were cracked, the points worn and blunted.
Its scales, once lightning-white, had turned translucent, like old teeth.
That must be how it had survived the dragon hunts—in the mist, it would disappear entirely.
It was sleeping. I was so close now that its breath fogged my armor, obscuring its own reflection. I drew my sword with only the meanest whisper of steel on leather, wrapped both hands around the hilt—and hesitated.
I had sworn once, in the ashes of the Black Bastion, with the warm fluids of my own eye oozing down my cheek, that I would never again take a life in the queen’s name.
But it was not for the queen that I lifted my blade, nor even for Dominion.
It was for you, with your rook’s voice and your doe’s eyes and your long, fine fingers.
You, who waited down the mountainside, a pen held in shaking hands, for the hero of his story to return.
The dragon opened one eye. Its iris was a shadeless gold, like all dragons’ eyes, like mine. My reflection was distorted on its surface, so that all I could see was my own gauntleted hands.
I aimed carefully—there was no need to hurry—and drove my sword deep into its pupil.
There was a turgid pop as the sword broke the jellied surface of the eye, then the gristle of tendons snapping and the long slide into the soft tissue of the brain. A great shudder moved down its body. Its limbs and tail thrashed, and something whipped hotly across my brow.
It screamed. They always scream, at the end: a long, unearthly wailing that goes on and on. It was a sound that brought men to tears, or to their knees. Once I had seen a grown soldier drop his spear and shield and walk west. He had not returned.
I stood and listened with my head bowed, letting the sound burrow deep, letting it hurt, because when it was done there would be no more dragons in Dominion.
Quiet fell. I slid my blade from the eye and wiped it clean against the scales. Then I shoved at the cooling meat of its body, heaving the coils aside, boots slipping in clear ichor and strange-smelling blood. It took days and days to burn a dragon properly, but Yvanne insisted.